And in the midst of it all, Nick’s voice in his ear, with a reminder. You still have the gun.
He couldn’t do that.
His mother was tapping on the window glass with her long fingernails, and now she was smiling.
“You had enough?” His father laughed. “That enough for you?”
Men didn’t cry; his father had taught him that a long time ago. He was full of lessons. West blinked back tears.
“You think you hurt?” his father asked. “You don’t know pain until you waste your life raising an animal. At least I can slaughter a cow and get something out of it. What good are you?”
This wasn’t right. This wasn’t him.
He spit in West’s face.
“Don’t come back here, Jeremiah. This rifle’s not just for show.”
Phlegm dripped down West’s cheek; his nose bled; his leg throbbed. But he rose to his feet.
“Go ahead, Dad. Shoot me. If that’s what you want.”
It almost looked like it was.
“I’m tired of lying,” West said. “You’re not worth it. This family’s not worth it.”
“This family’s not yours anymore. You saw to that. We won’t bear your shame.”
“No. Just yours.”
The rifle leveled itself at him.
No. His father leveled the rifle. At him.
“This is my home,” West said. “This is always going to belong to me.”
“Go.”
You still have the gun, the voice whispered.
He didn’t take the suitcases; he didn’t say goodbye. His parents were already gone. Soon, limping down the dirt road toward town, the sleeve of his sweatshirt blotting his bloody nose, the sky pinking up, so was he.
The deacon had taken Ellie that day to see the pyre, rising twelve feet into the sky, built from the wreckage of Oleander.
It was no wonder she couldn’t sleep.
All she had to do, he’d explained, was stand there. Offer, via her presence and her silence, a divine stamp of approval. She hadn’t asked what she was supposed to do if she didn’t approve, and the thought never occurred to him. She hadn’t asked any questions, because she’d been too shocked by the hastily stacked debris and the vision he painted for her, of scorching justice and righteous fire. Or because she was a coward.
That restless night, she gave up on sleep. She went to the church, to a small, secret room in the empty corridors; she knelt, and she prayed. Tell me what to do, she asked, tell me what to ask and what to say and how to stop being so afraid.
Instead, the voice told her she was a worthless joke, and what she should do was kill herself, and that was the only voice she heard.
She was crying when the lights came on and the deacon stepped inside.
“You’re distressed,” he said, and put his hands on her shoulders and raised her up.
She nodded, wiping away her tears.
“The time for doubts is over, Ellie,” he said. “They only bring pain. I should know.” He chuckled, rubbing his bandaged palms together. Some kind of accident with a hammer and nails, he’d said – a lesson for him to remember. “This is an age for certainty.”
She couldn’t look at him.
“Ellie,” he said, then gently tilted her chin so she was forced to meet his gaze. “What is it? What do you need?”
Someone to tell me what to do, she almost said, meant to say, but the words wouldn’t come out.
“It’s the pyre,” she said. “It’s Cass. I can’t do it.” And then, so softly she couldn’t even hear herself, “I can’t let you do it.”
“I’m not going to do anything. The town will judge her, and when the town finds her wanting, the town will seek its justice. Finally. And you’ll see, Ellie, it will be as if a burden has been lifted from us. ‘The Lord will wash away the filth of the women of Zion; he will cleanse the bloodstains from Jerusalem by a spirit of judgment and a spirit of fire.’ Isaiah 4:4.”
“It’s not right,” she said.
“I’ll tell you what’s not right. A murderer – a murderer of an innocent baby – not paying for her crimes. What else has our work been for, if not to guide this town to righteousness, to purge the sinners, and what better place to start than bringing the town’s original sinner to justice?”
“It’s not right.”
He shook his head, sorrowful at her lapse of faith. “The Lord tell you that?”
“He didn’t have to.”
“Because if not, I don’t see what makes you think you know right from wrong better than I do.”
Was it true, what they said, that she had talked to God?
Was she talking to God still, as they believed? Did the filthy pronunciations on the state of her soul and the depths of her sin come from above, below, or merely within?
Ellie no longer knew.
There had been a brief flash of clarity once, she remembered that. In the darkness of the storm, light had shone through. It hadn’t lasted. It never did.
Now there was only doubt, and the voice, and the deacon. He was sure, so she didn’t have to be. At least, that was how it was meant to work.
“I’m not going to stand there while you set a girl on fire,” she said.
“She’s got the devil in her. You know what you have to do with the devil.”
“The devil works by fire,” Ellie said. “And you don’t know what it’s like when… someone burns.”
He took her shoulders again and turned her to face him. His face was so bloated and red.
“You’re fragile, Ellie. But the world is not. The world is hard, and it’s full of hard choices. Someone like you shouldn’t have to be troubled by making them.”
“Let you make them for me, you mean.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, but yes. I’m here to guide you,” he said. “I’d like to think that the Lord brought us together so you wouldn’t have to walk this path alone.”
But you are alone, the voice said. You will always be alone.
That is your fate.
That is your purpose.
The deacon stood. “I worry about you, Ellie. We both know how far you’ve come. But every sin leaves its mark.”
“I’ve been cleansed,” she said. “Reborn.”
“We all backslide. We all face temptations.”
She shook her head.
“You need clarity, Ellie.”
That was true.
“You need help remembering, and we can do that. Haven’t I always helped you?”
She didn’t need to ask what he was doing when he crossed the room and slipped into the private bathroom adjacent to his office. Soon she heard the water running. It would take some time to fill the tub, and then he would call for her.
She could leave right now.
She could walk away.
But he had always helped her; he had always known what she needed.
He summoned her.
Methamphetamine was first synthesized in 1893; it took fifty years for the drug to make it to the United States, where it was quickly embraced as a miracle cure. Within a few years, the drug had become the standard treatment for narcolepsy, weight gain, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, hyperactivity, alcoholism, fatigue, impotence, and the common cold. Meth wove its way into the fabric of the nation, the quintessential American drug: a way for hardworking men and women to work even harder. Ads promised a dose would keep workers “peppy”; they showed housewives vacuuming euphorically, a little meth kick all that was needed to keep the little woman high on the drudgery of life. And its promise, in the short term, was no lie. For the uninitiated and the unravaged, meth offered a bump in concentration, energy, and focus – hence its appeal to factory workers, who could, until use turned to addiction turned to decay, pull eighteen-hour shifts without sleep and without complaint. It made the intolerable tolerable. It got you through.
That night, it did so for Jule.
There are five stages of a meth hit, even as small a one as Scott allowed
her. As she helped him roll the body in expensive sheets, as she scrubbed at bloodstains on her hands and knees, as she loaded the corpse into the pickup, she luxuriated in stage one: euphoria. A rush of adrenaline and ecstasy floated her through the dark logistics, every swipe of the sponge against the bleached carpeting a blessed rhythm, a song that beat with the pulse of her heart, a happiness like she’d never known.
By the time the truck sped into the swamps, the mania had subsided into a smooth, easy high, a sense of well-being so rock solid she wasn’t even troubled by the thought that this wasn’t the first body Scott would have dumped in the water she’d so often used to bathe. Scott, who’d shot up a little crystal fortitude of his own, talked the entire way, increasing in volume and speed as they drew closer to the swamp. The body thumped about in the back of the pickup, so loudly that Jule had to stop herself from turning around to check that it hadn’t returned to life in order to claim its revenge. The prospect only made her laugh.
“That’s what the Man does, you know, you got to think about it from all the angles and you’ll see he’s got to fool us into keeping ourselves down. In this country we volunteer to get shit on. Military service? Voluntary. Giving up our hard-earned money to some government asshole with a shit-eating grin just because he mailed you a form and asked for it? Voluntary. You know Congress makes a hundred new laws per year? You know it’s illegal here for a man to catch a fish with his own bare hands? Or to piss against the side of a building? They want life to be illegal, so they’ve always got an excuse to lock you up. They can lock you up for spitting on the sidewalk, but who’s locking them up? That’s what I want to know. They’re the crooks. They’re the terrorists. Who’s locking them up?”
She was a pro at tuning him out. But this time, his words washed over her as if they were water, dripping down her body and slipping inside, and she found herself nodding. Yes, yes, it made sense, it felt good to have someone to blame for the mess of her life, someone who wasn’t Uncle Scott, who rode beside her with his leg kicked up on the dash and his knee steering the truck and loved her like no one else would and killed so she wouldn’t have to. There were soldiers in the town and the soldiers worked for the government and maybe the government had caused the storm and definitely the government was keeping them all locked up in this hellhole and if it weren’t for that she could be on the road by now, she would have put miles between herself and the knife and she never would have jammed it into the parasite’s puffy flesh and felt the blade work its way through gristle and meat as if it were tearing at a slab of steak. Though maybe it would have been a shame to miss that. All experience was good experience, yes? And perverts deserved to pay.
Yes, she thought. Yes. She felt like saying it to the universe, like her life should be one giant yes, like that was its entire point and, stupid as ever, she’d taken this long to figure it out. She didn’t have to feel like her body was crawling with spiders just because some asshole wouldn’t stop looking at her; she didn’t have to lie in shit. She could take what she needed; she should take what she wanted. That’s all Scott had ever done, and who had the right to knock him down for that? Who had the right to lock him up?
Jule was beaming as they unloaded the body from the trunk, a sarcophagus in seven-hundred-thread-count sheets. She couldn’t stop a giggle from slipping out as they dragged it a short ways across the marsh and then, with two of Axe’s barbells tied to its ankles, dropped it into the water. There were catfish in there, Scott said, fierce scavengers, and they’d make short work of him. It seemed unlikely that anything could live in those murky waters, but he’d been right about so many things so far, surely he was right about this, too, surely he knew all. Suddenly, overcome by this man who could take her up in his arms, lift her like a small child, and in one fell swoop make everything okay, she hugged him, and buried her head in his chest, which smelled like swamp and blood, and didn’t know whether she was laughing or crying. The work was done; the night was finished; the parasite was gone forever.
And it was good.
When they arrived back at the house, all was dark and silent. Scott put her back into her bed and brushed the hair off her forehead and told her not to let the bedbugs chomp on her innards, and when she said she couldn’t do it, couldn’t lie here where she would dream of the parasite and where the air was clogged with bleach and lemon-scented freshener and where she could wake up with him on top of her even though he was decaying at the bottom of a lake, Scott told her she could do it, and yes, with eye-opening surprise, she saw that she could.
“You never tell anyone what happened tonight,” Scott said. “You even think about it, and I put you in the swamp. That would hurt me, but I’d do it. You get that?”
Yes, she did.
Afterward, most of the evening’s events were left mercifully blurred in her memory, but she would always remember promising to keep her mouth shut. She would always remember saying thank you, and meaning it, because she didn’t know then how hard it would be to forget, not just the smell of the body or the feel of the knife or the weight of the parasite and the twitch of his thing, but the glorious joy of the crystal coursing through her veins, the power and the clarity it gave her – and the hollow it left when it had gone.
Ellie knelt by the tub, with the deacon beside her. Steam rose from the water. She didn’t need to dip a finger to know it would be scalding hot, but she did so anyway, hoping the pain might clear her mind. It didn’t; it just hurt. It would hurt more if she disrobed and lowered herself into the water. She would scream, and thrash around a bit, and fear her skin was bubbling and burning, but in the end she would close her eyes and have faith and the Lord would guide her down.
At the beginning, it had been the deacon’s arms that guided her, seizing her bare shoulders and forcing her deeper into the boil until her body was submerged. Afterward, her skin would be raw and painful for days, but his promise held true: there was no lasting damage.
“Your clothes,” he said now. “You remember.”
The day her mother had discovered her with Baz, there’d been no time to gather her clothes and cover herself. Charlotte King had forced her wayward fourteen-year-old daughter into the car, driven to the deacon’s house, and dumped her on the doorstep, shivering, wet, and naked. The first bath had been curative, a warm, healing temperature to ease her shock and soak up her tears. It was only later, after the deacon had introduced her to the bedroom she would occupy until reformation was complete and her mother accepted her back into the fold, and to the daily schedule of chores and prayers, the ascetic, nunlike existence in which she would serve her penance, that he had introduced the cleansing ritual, the baptism of pain. He always carefully averted his eyes from her naked form.
That first day, he had taken her from her mother’s arms and covered her nakedness with the closest thing to hand, a dusty white sheet. She would always be grateful for that. Her mother found her bare and put her out; the deacon covered her and took her in. He had given her shelter, understanding, and, eventually, the Lord.
Salvation hurts, he told her.
Pain helps us defy temptation, he told her.
Pain will not let us forget.
She skimmed her fingers across the water again.
Pain.
“You’ve let in the devil before, Ellie. If you begin to think you can trust your own mind over the word of God, well, we know where that leads, don’t we?”
She could not go back to that.
But the water would burn, as Cassandra would burn, and she needed no one’s word to tell her that was wrong. That had to be wrong. Didn’t it?
The baths were their secret. She knew how people would talk if they knew. She knew what people would think.
They would be wrong.
It would be better if there were something indecent about the way his eyes passed over her naked body. If there were ulterior motives in his gaze, or in his touch. It would mark him as human – flawed as any of them, sympathetic to the desires of the f
lesh, victim to his own desires. But there was nothing in his gaze. There was no hint of impropriety, no thought of pleasure or trespass. He burned with righteousness, and nothing else. She’d never been a girl standing before him, naked and shivering. She’d been a sinner, with potential to be saved; she’d been a pawn in the devil’s game.
See me, she wanted to insist. But she recognized the impulse as a symptom of her own sickness. To strip her clothes off, as he intended, then force him to see what he’d wrought, the skin that would blister in the water, the smooth flesh he was forbidden. Touch me – if it would remind him that she was a person, that he was a person, that there existed anything beyond law and judgment and God’s wrath.